“Are you proud when you finish making a book?”

It’s more a sense of awe and wonder than “pride”. When a book goes to print, something that has lived solely inside my imagination suddenly takes shape in a very real and tangible way. It thrills me. Of course the finished book is never as beautiful as the shining house on the hill I imagined constructing when I first conceived the story, but the monumental task of putting one word after another, of building a novel from the foundation up and fitting it out with all the fixtures that make it habitable for a reader, never ceases to humble me and fill me with gratitude.